Light Pollution - Tumblr Posts

In the event of a mass power cut, how long would it take for the stars to become visible?

Would it be instantaneous? Would all the lights go out and you look up and there's the milky way? Or would it be slow? Would the sky stay dark as the light pollution caught in the clouds slowly bleeds away to reveal the stars?

(how fast would they disappear? To look up at the vastness of the heavens and the fullness of the universe and with final flick of a switch they disappear and you're surrounded by the artificial glow of streetlights.)

Literally so much of both human AND other animals’ physiology evolved to suit a world where for most of the earth’s entire history CONSTANT BRIGHT BLUE-SPECTRUM LIGHT WAS ONLY A DAYTIME OCCURENCE. Your whole circadian rythym, a lot about your brain chemistry, etc. gets so disoriented and confused by no longer having clear environmental distinctions between night and day.

This is so hard wired into our biology that some people literally develop symptoms of full blown clinical depression during the fall and winter because of the seasonal shift of daytime sunlight hours. Think about the absolutely terrifying rise in sleeping issues in industrialized nations to the point of 1 in 3 USA citizens admitting to some degree of constant sleep deprivation.

This is not just some arbitrary aesthetic preference, it’s an instinctual discomfort for something that screws with a lot of the body’s internal cycles and the chemical cues it relies on to regulate them. The practice of keeping urban areas under constant white light has existed for the blink of an eye compared to what we were doing for the majority of our species’ history.

At least bad screentime hygiene is something we can individually take some accountability and the full burden for, but city-wide light pollution is not just a human problem by any means. If we know SO MUCH about what this does to humans, imagine how disruptive this is to animals that rely on being able to identify the position of the moon or sun in order to navigate what direction to even move in. On nocturnal animals that have adapted for generations to hunt or find safety in the cover of night. To animals programmed to hit peak activity specifically at dawn and dusk hours. Second and third on what the above people said because these are ramifications I don’t see people talk about near enough.

perhaps some will disagree, but i think the world got worse when we changed the colour of the night

Yes!!! I'm lucky that my school is in the middle of Amish Town, Nowhereville, USA, so the areas surrounding campus have skies dark enough to see the Milky Way. On campus, though? Blue lights everywhere, all night. The dimmest thing you'll see is maybe Polaris. And forget trying to observe the night sky close to the city. The light pollution from one small college campus is nothing compared to the light emanating from a whole city.

Oh, and to heck with non-shaded street lights. Thanks to this stupid light right in front of my house (that shines right into my bedroom window, by the way), I can't even see the Pleiades Cluster when I'm at home.

I am super against light pollution, and have been for decades

but I am also super annoyed by the way it's framed as "without light pollution you can see how beautiful the night sky is" way more prominently than it's framed as "hey, did you ever stop to think of how much energy/resources/money are literally wasted by having so much light shine up into the sky?"

so people get the idea that light pollution can only be remedied by eliminating all night-time light, which would make being outside at night very inconvenient, instead of by making night-time light shine only on the ground where, y'know, the people who need it are

Light pollution is so unfair because everyone acts like it’s so normal

The night sky has been so extremely intricate for eons. You used to be able to see the Milky Way and millions of stars. Our water world ancestors saw Messier 67 at its birth and the first hominids grew up alongside it. Giovanni Battista Hodierna recorded M33 in 1654, 229 years before electronic telescopes were invented.

The Big Dipper being the lone constellation is a new development, only within the past 200, 300 years. It should feel terrifying, to look up at the sky and be alone, with only the haze of billboards and streetlights closing in.

What was once a commodity, people have to travel to the extremities of the world to see with the naked eye— there are less than 100 class 1 Bortle locations on the planet now. Dark sites are a visitation of our past.

Or something like that, I don’t know, I’m not an astrophysicist

I am super against light pollution, and have been for decades

but I am also super annoyed by the way it's framed as "without light pollution you can see how beautiful the night sky is" way more prominently than it's framed as "hey, did you ever stop to think of how much energy/resources/money are literally wasted by having so much light shine up into the sky?"

so people get the idea that light pollution can only be remedied by eliminating all night-time light, which would make being outside at night very inconvenient, instead of by making night-time light shine only on the ground where, y'know, the people who need it are

light pollution is largely the result poorly designed lighting, which wastes energy shining outward to the sky, where it is unwanted, instead of downwards to the ground, where it is needed. billions are spent each year on unshielded outdoor lights, though they are directly responsible for 14.7 million tons of carbon dioxide waste in the u.s. alone.

our overlit cities and suburbs have radically altered the light rhythms to which many forms of life, including diurnal animals such as ourselves, have adapted, disrupting the migratory, reproductive and feeding cycles of nocturnal creatures in potentially devastating ways.

light, for example, makes nocturnal animals easier prey, and acts as a magnet for birds, with the latter effect so powerful that scientists speak of some birds being literally “captured” by searchlights, circling in the thousands until they drop. the effect was notably observed in new york’s tribute of lights.

the effect on humans is just as profound. darkness is not only essential to our biological welfare (with light pollution linked to breast and prostate cancer), but the light of the stars and the rhythms of day and night is part our collective evolutionary and cultural patrimony. yet, two thirds of humanity live under skies polluted with light, while one fifth of the planet can no longer see the milky way.

photos by jim richardson from his series “death of night,” to consider during earth hour, which is saturday, march 29 at 8:30pm.

Responsible lighting for wildlife/nature and sky viewing.

via: Driftless Stargazing LLC

its been p common knowledge for decades that light pollution can be massively reduced by just putting shades on streetlamps, and that doing that would save energy, help wildlife, and let us see the stars better, but are society says if u wanna change any minor little tiny thing u gotta dedicate ur whole life to campaigning for it and this is a good ways down the list of priorities for most ppl, so instead i gotta walk past newly-installed streetlamps that are just dumb glass globes that use half their electricity to blast half their light directly into the sky where it does only bad things for no reason and think "we should overthrow the government"